


Dead Worlds

by branwyn



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-19
Updated: 2009-11-19
Packaged: 2017-10-03 10:18:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/branwyn/pseuds/branwyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lucy Saxon lives in the TARDIS now, and finds that one mad alien is much like another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dead Worlds

Lucy has a room all to herself in the Doctor's TARDIS, but the door doesn't open. Not for her, anyway.

It's a comfortable room, lavish, really, quite the equal of her cabin on the Valiant, only there the doors did not lock---not after the last time Harry found her with the pills. She likes her new solitude. She has almost stopped flinching when the Doctor comes to visit. He appears once a day, every day, and takes her walking. There's a garden in the TARDIS, with a pond and a pebbled shoreline. Sometimes she hears birdsong, a burst of fluttering wings, catches movement high in the branches from the corner of her eye.

The first day he brought her here from the Valiant, Lucy had felt as though she had walked into the landscape of someone else's dream. Green light spilled down the corridors ahead of her, like the reflected glow of an underground lake. She hasn't seen the corridors since that day, he doesn't take that path to lead her to the garden. She thinks the garden may be part of her rooms, only she hasn't ever been able to find them on her own.

Occasionally, the Doctor takes her out of the TARDIS altogether. But only when they visit the empty worlds, she notices, bathed in the brilliant light of their dying moons---only in places that remind her of the howling dark at the end of the universe. The Doctor puts his arm around her when she shivers, and she wraps her hand around his wrist, feeling there the strange pulse of his double heartbeats. They are so much alike, her husband and the Doctor. Harry had liked to show her things, too.

The Doctor does not talk to her about Harry. She doesn't know why, because she knows he wants to, knows he thinks about him all the time---more than she does, really. Sometimes when she looks at the Doctor she sees a man, sees an anguish in him that she understands. Sometimes, though, she sees the stirring of something behind his eyes that frightens her more than anything Harry had ever said or done in two and a half years of marriage. And Lucy had seen and heard quite a lot, despite the pills.

Eventually, she understands why Harry chose to die in the end.

He would have let her go in time, she thinks, if she had proven that she really wanted it, no more half-hearted overdoses in the tub. Harry would have let her die. Why not, after all? He was already beginning to tire of her. Malice does tire, over time, like jealousy and possessiveness and cruelty. Harry had no more use for her; eventually, he would have let her go.

Not the Doctor, though. There will never be any escape from the Doctor. Malice tires; love is unceasing in its vigilance. And the Doctor is capable of so much love...

He looks at her sometimes---they don't really talk, Lucy almost never speaks and the Doctor doesn't seem to need any response to his monologues---but he does look at her, and Lucy thinks he must see some secret at the heart of her that he hopes he can pluck out with enough searching. She offers herself mutely to his dissection, and in time he always looks away, frustration coiled in his features like a serpent waiting to strike.

The next time he takes her to a dead planet, she wanders away from him a bit and takes a hard look at her surroundings. Icy winds stir the dust into small cyclones at her feet. It smells stale, this wind, and somehow familiar. Lucy gazes up high into the skeletal branches of a bare stone tree, and seems to catch a glimpse of movement from just out of the corner of her eye, a fluttering burst, like bird's wings. But there are no birds. There is nothing on this planet, it's dead. The Doctor brings her to one dying world after another, like a little boy showing off a pocket full of marbles---and that's when Lucy looks again towards the branches of the tree. There is a light, just overhead, that she had taken for a star, but it isn't a star at all. It is a small round lightbulb, one of the TARDIS's interior lights.

She is still inside the TARDIS.

Lucy spins on her heel and looks at the Doctor, who gazes back without changing his expression, but she knows that he knows. And he does not care.

_Boy with a pocket full of marbles..._

The next day, when he comes to the door of her room, she does not rise from her seat in front of the vanity. She does not turn to greet him. She searches for his reflection in the mirror of her dressing table, and watches his eyes bore into the back of her head. The seconds tick past audibly in her mind, until at last she can stand it no more, and she speaks.

"I don't know why," she tells him.

He starts, and lifts his chin, as though to cover the first reflexive movement, but she has seen him. She turns slightly in her chair, not to meet his eyes, but so she is no longer giving him her back.

"I don't know why he picked me," she continues, and with every word she can hear doors down an endless corridor slamming shut between them. "I don't know why he let me in, and not you. I don't know what I was to him."

The Doctor does not reply, nor does he enter the room. He stands staring at her for a long moment---and then he steps back. The door slides closed between them, sealing her alone in the room, and the echoes of their movements do not cease to reverberate for a long time.

Lucy waits, but the Doctor does not return that day, nor does he come the next. She wonders if she will ever see the garden again, or feel the wind sweeping the surface of another of the countless dead planets in the Doctor's collection.

In Lucy's single human heart, there is just enough understanding of aliens to make her suspect she will be in this room, without wind or moons or gardens, for a very long time indeed.


End file.
